Father Georg and the devil
The devil really seems to have materially penetrated the walls of the Vatican, according to Father Georg's impressions. Damato's Scratches
I will not mention names of newspapers and journalists here in order not to emulate both in their way, for me agitated and questionable, of dealing with the case of the "monsignor halved". This is how the interested party was called, unfortunately with his own contribution, due to the controversies caused by his own reflections, let's call them that, after the death of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and then Pope Benedict XVI, effective and finally emeritus. Of which Father Georg Gaenswein had the great privilege of having been the secretary, that is, the closest collaborator.
News, as we know, is news, so we must also resign ourselves to its inconvenience, and even to its undesirable effects, without shirking the obligation to collect and tell it. And news of a certain clamor has certainly not spared himself, nor has he spared the public understood in the broadest sense, believer or non-believer or otherwise believer, as you prefer, Father Georg precisely.
THE "DEVILS" OF FATHER GEORG IN THE VATICAN
He did it, for example, by allowing himself to be interviewed, with the still almost warm body of his superior who died declaring his love for Christ, to tell of the "devils" who had been warned in the Vatican for quite some time. And to define himself as halved, as I mentioned at the beginning, due to a decision made by Benedict XVI's successor precisely on his behalf, inviting him to remain prefect of the papal household in name only, but not to really claim to do so in a house in the meanwhile expanded, let's say so. Where orders no longer belonged to the emeritus but to the effective pontiff.
Why "halved"?, I would ask precisely for this reason, considering the very particular situation created with the renunciation of Pope Ratzinger to operationally complete his mandate until his death. And what about Father Georg's vestments and clothes with the bandages, wounds and all the other fantasies of Italo Calvino's halved Viscount Medardo, bothered by some erudite journalist to transform the sixteenth-century Bohemia of the war against the Turks imagined by the famous Italian writer?
WAR AMONG THE POPES?
Free imagination in free journalism, like a free Church in a free State, please. But here the desire, and absolutely no duty, to muddy the waters, even those of the sprinkler system in the Church and surroundings, seems to have prevailed over the desire, and the duty, to inform. A desire that finally became unbridled when, dipping the biscuit or the metaphorical pen in the ink of an autobiographical book by Father Georg with an already unfortunate title like the almost judicial one of "Nothing but the truth", someone fired on the whole front page of his own newspaper "the war between the Popes". Of which the defeated by the damned combination of renunciation and the supervening physical death could count from the afterlife – if he really wanted to, as I personally don't believe due to the mythical meekness and obedience shown in life – on the defense of the secretary who remained to fight on earth, pleased among the "hawks".
And determined to "tell the truth" until his last breath: things, these too, taken or inferred and shot into headlines from some newspaper by reading the first copies, or even the drafts of the monsignor's book. Who, received or summoned by the Pope in a laconically announced audience unexpectedly, allegedly complained about the not infrequent habit of ill-intentioned people, perhaps even convinced that they were helping, of reading words and sensing the feelings of a writer or an orator "outside the context". Where it is notoriously possible to make the interested party say the opposite of reality or of what he really wanted to say or write. It's a bit like what the English prince Harry has tried to do in America these days in the face of the reactions to his book on the already quite tormented British royal family.
The devil, in order to return to our house, or almost so, seems to have really materially penetrated the walls of the Vatican, according to the first impressions felt by Father Georg, or attributed to him. Let alone outside the sacred walls, including newspapers and printing houses, where the defenses against Satan and subjects are by nature weaker. And consequently stronger temptations.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/padre-georg-diavolo-vaticano/ on Sat, 14 Jan 2023 06:51:34 +0000.